


Let what is broken so remain

by syllogismos



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-12 23:29:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2128509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllogismos/pseuds/syllogismos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Both Peter’s hands now found Jim’s waist, for balance, and then up from his waist to his back, collecting the imperfect topography that told the story—in one man’s skin and sinew—of The Fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. and the minstrel sings

Peter parked the Citroën, climbed out, and looked around. The sun was bright, the grass greener than green. His first uncharitable thought was that this was far too picturesque a place for Jim Prideaux to have ended up. His second was that it didn’t matter because Jim wouldn’t find happiness here; he’d never find it anywhere.

Smiley had said something about a trailer, but aside from the central prominence of Thursgood’s, the horizon was broken only by trees and a parish church off in the distance. Peter dropped his head and rolled his neck out, easing the tightness of a long drive. Then he set off on a stroll, pretending to purpose. He aimed, unconsciously, for where the grass sloped away, and when he found The Dip and Jim’s trailer resting at the very bottom, he knew he’d been looking without knowing.

The Dip was perfect for him: Jim had always been the kind of fighter who built a fortress out of sticks and mud, deceptively secure. When attacked he’d convince you his citadel was a corner you’d backed him into, desperate and panicked. You wouldn’t walk away from the encounter.

Bill Haydon hadn’t walked away.

* * *

The first pour—Jim’s, naturally—was a generous three fingers, and Peter reached for his glass but paused before lifting it. He didn’t know whether to raise his glass to Jim’s, nor what to say if he did. He faltered too far, and when he looked up, Jim’s gaze pierced through him, accusatory.

Peter raised his glass and tipped it slightly in Jim’s direction, watching amber liquid slip at an angle. Jim waited.

“To lost loves,” Peter hadn’t meant say.

Jim inclined his drink and took a sip, then set it aside.

“Why not have me into the Nursery?”

Peter sipped, twice, and didn’t answer.

“Smiley trusts you.” The ‘overmuch’ Jim left hanging, unspoken.

Peter took another sip of whisky. He stood and shrugged out of his jacket, hanging it carefully over the back of his chair before crossing the small distance to the trailer’s port-hole of a window with a dingy blue curtain pushed to the side. His back was to Jim’s, pointedly unguarded.

“It’s nice here.” He picked at the buttons of his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. It was warmer than he’d expected.

“You _volunteered_ for this.” Jim couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

“I might admit to a certain curiosity–” Peter craned his neck as if to get a better look at the dull, unbroken view of the grassy incline on all sides. “–regarding the decision to execute a traitor, quite painlessly, rather than let him suffer the consequences of his crimes.” Peter turned, observing the increased tension in the crooked line of Jim’s shoulders. He retreated to his seat, rolled a swallow of whisky around in his mouth before putting it down, and asked, point blank: “Was it love?”

“It wasn’t painless.”

* * *

Peter found Jim outside on the step of the trailer, smoking. He leant away when Peter unlatched the door, giving Peter room to step outside. There wasn’t room for them both on the step, so Peter took a seat just beside. He raised a hand to shelter his eyes from the pounding rays of the sun and tried to string together his thoughts.

“You shouldn’t have tried to keep up with me.”

“Mmm,” Peter answered. He reached and tapped a hand to Jim’s knee, hoping the gesture would be understood. In lieu of lighting another, Jim passed Peter his cigarette. Peter took two long drags before passing it back. They smoked a succession of cigarettes as the sun ascended to noon, Jim lighting another to share as soon as they’d finished one, until Peter’s head spun with dehydration and nicotine and confusion.

“Does time always just _sit_ here?” Peter asked.

Jim took a minute to answer: “More so, when you’re alone.”

Boys shouted in the distance, above The Dip and out of sight. Rugger, it might have been. Peter didn’t have to ask whether the boys were a reprieve from “alone”. (They weren’t.)

Peter registered the tap at his hand and looked up at Jim, suddenly uncomprehending the gesture even though they’d been passing cigarettes back and forth all morning.

“Let’s go back inside.”

Jim followed. Peter drank two glasses of water at the sink, then splashed some water on his face. He stood with his head bent, eyes closed, concentrating on the coolness of the water evaporating from his face and registering the tug on his bicep only a bare second before he’d intended to turn himself around.

Jim held up a clean tea towel and dried Peter’s face, patting his cheeks first, then sweeping slowly over his forehead and around his eyes and nose. Only the towel made contact with Peter’s skin, and Peter kept his eyes closed. He opened them when he felt Jim’s fingers tracing his jaw, drawing a line to the nape of his neck. Jim’s face displayed the same pensive expression it nearly always did, but his fingers pushed gently into Peter’s hair, caressing the place where his skull met his spine. Heart racing, Peter took half a step forward and wrapped an arm around Jim’s waist. Jim leaned in closer, pressing his forehead to Peter’s, and Peter despaired at the hot tease of Jim’s breath brushing his cheek. Just before Jim pressed his mouth to Peter’s he tightened his hold on Peter’s neck. Peter gasped, and Jim took advantage, pinning Peter against the sink and opening his mouth further with a probing tongue. Both Peter’s hands now found Jim’s waist, for balance, and then up from his waist to his back, collecting the imperfect topography that told the story—in one man’s skin and sinew—of The Fall.

* * *

“It wasn’t painless for you, or for him?” Peter didn’t have to ask, not really. The pain was etched still—perhaps permanently—in the stained hollows under Jim’s eyes.

Jim, for his part, didn’t flinch, didn’t blink.

The disgust washed over Peter in a rolling wave; his stomach flipped, then flopped gracelessly, and he let the burn of whisky wash away the disgust, distill it down to two half-whispered words, dripping with his disdain: “Selfish bastard.”

“That he was.”

“Not _him_.” Peter took in a breath and released it slowly, diluting an incandescent rage into bitter resignation. “You aren’t the only one who made sacrifices.”

“Never said I was.”

“But you rendered the meaning of the rest of- of _ours_ , just– It’s fucking _pointless_ ,” Peter spat. “How do you go on?”

Jim raised his glass.

* * *

Jim slept on his stomach, his face turned to the wall. Peter lay awake next to him; there wasn’t even room in the trailer to stretch out on the floor, and Jim had insisted, gruffly, that they share the bed, then turned away and betrayed no interest as Peter turned out the light and stripped to his vest and pants. The heat radiating from Jim’s body was distracting at Peter’s back; eventually he turned to his other side, facing Jim, and he fell asleep watching the evidence of a life saved—the rise and fall of lungs, the constant of a human life.

He woke in the small hours of the morning to find his arm draped over Jim’s lower back and his face pressed almost into Jim’s armpit. His nostrils were full of sour musk and whisky-sweat, but he fell asleep again before he could muster the will to move.

* * *

Peter took the liberty to pour their second. The silence was getting to be too cloying, too pressing, too close. He raised his glass; Jim hesitated, then followed suit.

“To Control.”

Jim narrowed his eyes, but he echoed, “Control.”

“May he rest in peace.”

They sipped. Twilight settled, darkening faster in The Dip with its artificially high horizon on all sides. The inside of the trailer grew dim, but neither of them moved to turn on the light. The silence changed character, retreating to a comfortable distance to watch, instead of shadowing with suffocating nearness.

* * *

The reality of Jim’s scars was even more heartbreaking than their spectre through cotton. Peter had to resist the urge to put his mouth on them—an unwholesome desire, surely, not to be carried through. Then he thought again and covered one of the angry puckers at the center of the mess carefully with his palm, pushing Jim back against the trailer door, trapping him. Jim bit Peter’s bottom lip and clutched his neck in a vice grip, and Peter reveled to feel his cock pulse and harden further.

It didn’t come to anything more than desperate frotting against each other, the trailer door providing leverage and a loose, clattering counterpoint. It was quiet, aside from the door’s protesting rattle; neither of them knew how to cease from the habit of biting a shoulder to stifle, holding back yet leaving marks that spoke louder, for a greater time, tiny (screaming) blood-red crescents.

* * *

Jim’s third pour was far from steady. It slopped outside their glasses onto the Formica. It wasn’t only the scent of whisky, thick and slightly acrid, that turned Peter’s stomach.

“I don’t understand it,” Peter said to his drink.

“I’ll make it simple for you.” Jim gulped down his portion and leaned back in his chair, wincing almost imperceptibly. (Almost.) “I owed him my life, more than once.”

“But did you? He might have only–”

“Does it matter?” Jim broke in, a new sharpness in his voice, its former exhausted timbre fled and gone. “I’m here. I survived, no small thanks to him.”

“An eye for an eye?”

“Something like that.”

“I didn’t know you were such a fundamentalist.”

Jim sighed, a broken hitch in the outpouring of his breath. “I didn’t used to be,” he told his empty glass, turning it with steady fingertips on the rim.

* * *

“There’s a boy up there, watching us.”

“Ju–” Jim started. “Roach,” he finished. “I sent him away.”

They’d retreated again inside the trailer to escape from the too-bright sun, the too-green idyll of the dense, soft grass. Peter was tugging Jim’s scrap of curtain across the small window when he saw the boy, thick glasses glinting in the sun, face plump and piggy but alert, watchful.

Jim stepped to stand behind Peter, close enough for him to feel his voice in the air beside his ear.

“He’s a watcher, like us. No friends. Kept turning up here.”

The unsaid was easy for Peter to fill in. Jim had turned him away after—no, likely _before_ —he’d taken care of Bill. He couldn’t face the kid, knowing what he was about to do, and he couldn’t face him after, knowing what he’d done. Jim had those scruples: what children should and shouldn’t be exposed to.

Children saw more and knew more than they let on, was the problem. Or so Peter had always thought.

“Why did you do it?”

Jim knew Peter wasn’t asking about sending Roach away. “It was wrong, but it was the right thing to do.”

“For love?”

Jim reached a hand to Peter’s waist and ghosted his fingers over the ridge of his hip. Peter felt his skin prickle into gooseflesh.

“For–” Jim didn’t finish, didn’t answer. He sank to his knees, two hands now on Peter’s hips. He used them to turn Peter, and then he used them to undo Peter’s trousers and pull his trousers and pants down to his knees. Peter felt the damp warmth of Jim’s breath at the base of his cock, then the slightly cold touch of his nose in the thatch of hair surrounding. Jim’s words were muffled in skin: “For the memory of something that might have been that, once.” Jim sighed, his breath hot and teasing. Peter resisted the urge to look down, but the blood in his veins had no such qualms about traveling south.

Jim worked Peter’s prick into his mouth without using his hands (those clutched to the back of Peter’s thighs, just at the seam of his buttocks). He held Peter’s prick in his mouth, working his lips around the base and shifting his tongue as it lengthened and hardened. Peter still didn’t look down; he reached blindly for Jim’s head and held him by the jaw and the back of his neck. When Jim started to move, Peter concentrated on the shifting of tendons and ligaments under his fingertips. The bobbing of Jim’s head flickered at the bottom of his vision, so he tipped his head back, and his next exhale came out as a groan.

This wasn’t– He couldn’t–

Peter firmed his grip and eased Jim’s head away. His prick throbbed at the loss.

“What?”

Peter couldn’t answer, so he had to look: Jim, lips red and slightly swollen, a detectable flush in his cheeks.

“Just let me.” There was a hard edge under the croak in Jim’s voice, and Peter nodded.

This time he watched. Jim closed his eyes, and Peter watched himself getting sucked off. He’d thought it was some strange kind of penance, what Jim was doing, until he felt Jim swallowing around the head of his prick as he came down his throat. The world spun and shimmered, and Peter understood that it wasn’t penance, not at all; it was only the thirsting reach of a lonely man, a reach for connection, for solid proof that the solipsistic nightmare of an Eastern prison had been but the memory of mild discomforts exaggerated by fever dream and popular myth.

But it hadn’t been: the nightmare was the truth and the rubicon Peter could never cross. He held Jim’s face in his hands and marveled that he could feel—so easily, so presently—Jim’s pulse and the measured, steady tide of his breath, but yet know so little of him.

* * *

It was after the third pour—after he stopped counting—that Peter got the story. Not carefully edited, but certainly not complete. Jim wasn’t trying to deceive or misdirect, Peter suspected, he only couldn’t tell himself how the world had turned under his feet in those days, couldn’t distinguish the truth from the web of lies he’d spun for protection.

“Do you know what they tell you?” he started.

“Toby,” Peter supplied. Jim nodded.

“‘Draw a line’, the little prick said, ‘Draw a line.’” Jim stood abruptly, lurching, then wincing. “You lot make it fucking _hard_ to draw a line. ‘Draw a line, make a new life, forget the whole thing.’ But– Smiley, now _you_. All I’m good for these days is my story. And teaching sn– small boys fucking French.”

They were more words than Peter had ever heard from Jim at once. He waited while Jim paced. Jim’s anger, he suspected, was not in reaction to being asked to tell it all over, tell it from the start, but to the hypocrisy of being told to forget, then interrogated again and again. And further, his fury was in reaction to the indignity of being ordered to eat the lotus flower by Esterhase, then casually dismissed. Esterhase might not have even removed his driving gloves for the conversation. Just a quick errand, executed in transit from point A to point B.

Jim resettled himself at the table, rolling his bad shoulder and propping himself carefully, only his good shoulder making contact with the chair back. He started at the beginning: Control’s directive.

“You tried to see George before you left.”

“He told you?”

Peter nodded.

“I did see Bill.” Peter nodded again.

Jim frowned. “Bill must’ve said.”

“What?”

“I denied it when Smiley asked me. Bill must’ve told him, then he told you.”

Peter shrugged; it was difficult to count such a small admission among the things that mattered, until he realized: “You tried to warn him.”

“I did warn him. I warned the bloody mole.”

“Did you tell him the details? Control’s theory?”

“Of course not!” Jim bellowed.

“But he didn’t need that,” Peter replied calmly.

Jim might have nodded, a small movement. He looked away, and Peter waited, watching his eyes, dark but clear and fixed. His face carried the weight of a decade from the last year alone, Peter estimated, decade-deep trenches lining his forehead and spreading, like dangerous cracks in pond-ice, from the corners of his eyes.

“Did you say goodbye, just in case?”

Peter watched as Jim’s eyes grew watery, and he held himself still and silent when Jim snatched up his glass, finished his portion in a single swallow, and slammed the glass back down with all the force he could muster from his good arm. Peter only spread his fingers wide on the table to brace himself, spine stiff. Jim left then, and the night was so quiet, Peter could hear his rough breathing as he climbed The Dip and departed.

Jim returned in less than a hour; Peter, lost in his own thoughts, hadn’t cared to judge his absence more closely than that. He waited for Jim to resettle himself, and then: “I know about the mission. Tell me about after you were shot. Walk me through it.”

Jim held Peter’s gaze. “No.”

A gauntlet. It was Peter’s turn: Jim wouldn’t say more without an equal exchange of vulnerability. Peter wanted to get up, to tell it without having to see Jim’s face, but that was an instinct born of cowardice. He swallowed instead, trying to force back the nauseating terror that had risen. He couldn’t tell if his voice shook, but he could feel the sweat bloom under his arms and from his palms. “I didn’t get to say goodbye,” he started. “My lover.” Peter paused, took a deep breath. “His name was Richard. I had to make him leave, make him so angry he wouldn’t try to come back.”

A moment stretched thin to breaking between them, and Jim face’s could have been stone. When he spoke, it was a monosyllable: “Why?”

“George said–” Peter looked at his hands; George hadn’t spelled anything out, but there had been assumptions understood. “Esterhase had set his dogs on me, George thought.”

“Did George know?”

Jim wasn’t asking about George knowing about what Esterhase had or hadn’t done. “I don’t know,” Peter answered honestly. “I think so.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know.” Peter struggled to pin intuition to memories. “A couple of years, I suppose, since he stopped asking after my luck with the typing pool.”

“Not Smiley,” Jim corrected. “Richard.”

The name sounded foreign, spoken from another’s mouth, and Peter’s stomach turned over again. “Ten years.”

“You ran North Africa for four.”

“On and off, then.”

“Was it love?”

Peter didn’t hesitate; someone had to prove it could be admitted. “Yes,” he said, trying for an edge of steel behind the simple final sibilant.

* * *

When Peter asked about the shooting and subsequent interrogation, Jim couldn’t sit still. He paced, he answered Peter’s questions sharply. He’d turned on the only light source in the trailer, a bare-bulbed lamp next to his narrow bed. It threw strange shadows, and Peter couldn’t stop tracing the broken shape of Jim’s shoulders, the pained line of them projected on the walls. It was as if Jim’s history made itself manifest in everything that touched him, even light itself; nothing escaped.

Jim’s recitation of his ordeal, agitated though it was, remained neutral until the story took them back to England. He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice when he spoke of Sarratt and the still-closed swimming pool, the tedium of yet more isolation, broken only by ill-matched games of chess with Cranko, and—far from least—the dismissive, condescending finality of his meeting with Esterhase.

When Jim appeared to have stalled out, Peter prompted, “Then what?”

“Then here,” Jim answered flatly.

“Straightaway?”

“Where else would I have gone?”

Peter recalled a snippet from Jim’s file, a quotation from a letter of introduction Bill had written, describing Jim as having a ‘rather parentless look’. He saw it now: though aged beyond his years, Jim had the shy, striving, tenderly hopeful (and easily beaten-down) expression of an orphan boy, or at least the common fictional representation of one. He’d hardened, but his nature couldn’t be changed. Instead, it had been armored.

* * *

The day Peter drove back to London dawned cold. The dew clung to the ends of the grass through hot black coffee and dry toast, and it soaked the bottom hem of Peter’s trousers when he left Jim’s trailer behind mid-morning, climbing the slope of The Dip carefully, the still-wet grass slippery underfoot.


	2. our great deeds, as half-forgotten things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes he thought of the wound as a memory he couldn’t keep down. He tried his damnedest to patch it over and forget, but even his damnedest wasn’t always enough.
> 
> (John le Carré, _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ )

Next weekend, Peter drove twenty kilometers in the wrong direction, watching in his rearview, before he circled around and aimed for Thursgood’s. He couldn’t say what drew him: it certainly wasn’t infatuation, and it wasn’t lust. It held the outer shape of a burgeoning friendship, but there was something rough and unyielding underneath, a deeper foundation of ancient bedrock. Peter tried to clear his mind of the mysterious compulsion and fixed his thoughts instead on the unanswered question—Irina’s fate (though George felt certain Jim had witnessed her execution). He hummed, tunelessly, as he drove.

Jim didn’t answer to the first knock, nor to the second. At the third, he shouted, “Bugger off!” and Peter knew he’d been recognized. He stepped into the trailer and immediately lifted his hand to cover his mouth and nose: sweat, vodka, and something sharper (medical, perhaps antiseptic) underneath them both. Jim lay on his narrow bunk, naked from the waist up but for a triangle of lint covering over his scars, tied in front with string. He glowed with fever, and only his eyes tracked Peter’s entrance. Peter halted, reconsidered, and quietly discarded his goal of extracting additional intelligence from Jim. It didn’t feel like much of a loss.

“Hello,” Peter said, to fill the silence.

Jim met Peter’s gaze in acknowledgment, but then his brown eyes sank, and his eyelids drooped to follow. Peter only just stopped himself from asking whether Jim needed to be in hospital. The answer was obvious (yes), but so was his refusal to go. “What can I do?” he asked instead. When Jim failed to answer, he shucked his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and assessed. The sink was clear, so Jim either hadn’t been taken ill long enough to have dirtied dishes he hadn’t the energy to wash up, or he hadn’t been eating and drinking at all. Or not drinking things other than vodka, Peter revised, observing a line of empty pints on a low shelf. The draining board hosted the supplies for Jim’s makeshift dressings: scraps of lint with string stitched to the corners, hibitane, and a kettle that touch reported not to have been recently used.

Peter crossed to Jim and looked down—not touching, not just yet—examining Jim’s current dressing: dry and yellow with seepage, probably sticking painfully to the raw wound beneath. The fever had only begun, perhaps, or perhaps radically worsened, since Jim had last applied a fresh dressing.

Peter scrubbed his hands and wrists, put the kettle to boil, and rummaged for a clean flannel. He doused the flannel straight from the kettle and held it by one corner over the sink, steam billowing wetly. He wrung it to near dry when it had cooled enough to touch.

Finding a knife was far from difficult. (Jim’s rifle, on a high shelf above the door, was also easy to find.) Peter cut the strings tying the triangle of lint around Jim’s shoulder, then slowly covered the dressing with the flannel and pressed down gently. Jim groaned and opened his upper eye a crack.

“I’m trying to unstick it first,” Peter explained, then increased the pressure he was applying through the flannel, uncertain whether it was wet enough to soak the dressing and soften the discharge dried like glue. Jim whimpered and tensed. Peter kept the pressure firm and even and counted Jim’s breaths, counted them to ten, before he let up and tested a corner. It lifted easily, so Peter kept pulling, but when he got to the center of the wound, Jim instinctively tried to curl away, and Peter could only free the remainder with one sharp tug, allowing Jim to escape. Jim pressed his forehead into the bed and gasped voicelessly, “ _Fuck_.”

The wound was infected, undoubtedly; it was red, weeping, and it _stank_. Red was better than dark gray-purple, gray-green or black, Peter noted to himself. He discarded the old dressing, reaching under Jim’s shoulder to find all the loose string, then washed his hands again and started preparing a new dressing while Jim watched from slits of eyes.

Peter applied the new hibitane-soaked dressing with tape, pressing down hard with his thumbs to adhere the ends. Jim’s skin was hot with fever and moist with sweat. Finished with this first task, Peter found himself a second, all the while trying to ignore the tickling itch of Jim’s fever-dulled eyes, dulled and weary, but nevertheless tracking his every movement. He stopped himself—just scarcely—from humming to fill the silence. After locating a fresh flannel, he turned the tap as cold as it would go, soaked the flannel, wrung it half-dry, and folded it twice in the same direction. He draped it around Jim’s neck and watched as Jim’s eyes closed entirely and some of the tension in his back subsided.

Later, while Jim slept and dreamt fever dreams, Peter ventured to the village, returning with a thermometer, paracetamol, and, after a sudden flash of insight, tea. Much to Peter’s surprise, it was the tea-making that roused Jim almost to a sitting position, his good shoulder wedged into the corner of the bed and trailer wall, his bad shoulder curled protectively inward.

“You’re not going to be able to drink it like that.”

Jim aimed a mulish glare in Peter’s direction, but Peter only raised a skeptical eyebrow in return and pointed out, “You’re resting on your good arm.”

Peter improvised a stack of pillows (two of them, in reality, seat cushions borrowed from the chairs at the table) against the wall and turned away to let Jim gracelessly move to arrange himself against them, still leaning most of his weight on his good side, but a good deal more vertical and with his good hand free to hold a mug of tea.

But it was paracetamol, two of them, that Peter pressed into Jim’s palm first. Jim swallowed them dry and reached for the tea—black, as Peter hadn’t bought milk (there was nowhere to keep it; Jim must’ve taken most of his meals at the school).

Peter couldn’t watch Jim drink his tea. He busied himself with unnecessary tidying, his ears burning with what he realized, after a few moments, was a projection of what should have been _Jim’s_ humiliation—the humiliation of Peter seeing him so weak, so vulnerable, the humiliation of having allowed Peter to prove his lack of self-sufficiency, still, even now, under the weight of his wound. Jim betrayed none of this humiliation, and that only amplified its projection onto Peter.

Recognizing his discomfort for what it was, Peter’s first thought was _I didn’t ask for this_ , but his second was _Sod it_. How well did Peter know Jim anyway? He’d thought of Jim as the ultimate in dogged, bullheaded self-determination and independence, but had that, perhaps, only been how he’d been meant to see him? Jim had let Haydon speak of him and for him, so often, and Jim’s hard-headedness had been in that letter, Haydon’s letter of introduction for Jim to a Circus talent-spotter. Maybe it was all just how _Haydon_ had wanted Jim to be seen. And it was a gross understatement to say that Haydon had had an agenda all his very own.

Peter turned to look at Jim. It was stupid: how could he expect to throw out everything he thought he’d known of Jim and then replace it with a single glance? But Peter did it anyway and was caught immediately in Jim’s sight. Jim had been watching him. Wary? No, he didn’t flinch at being caught watching, didn’t feel threatened or embarrassed, not apparently. Curious, inquisitive, trying to work out what Peter was doing, trying to reconcile the gesture of tea with this standoffish fidgeting about.

Jim didn’t say anything. The reserve was genuine (and had, as it had played out, provided a convenient canvas for Haydon’s masks).

“Shall I join you?” Peter asked, heart in his throat. He indicated the space next to Jim, on his bad side, with a nod.

“Please.”

Peter waited until Jim had finished his tea to kiss him. He kissed the corner of his mouth, first, because he’d caught Jim by surprise. His second kiss, lips to lips, tasting tea—it spoke of affection, maybe even love. Peter tried to hold the moment gentle; he trapped his breath still in his chest, and he waited. Jim also dared not breathe. The quiet held them both, and The Dip, outside, cradled Jim’s trailer in its deep, secret and safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Movie!Guillam and more-or-less movie!Prideaux, but with a lot of details lifted from the novel.
> 
> The question 'Was it love?' is borrowed quite directly from [Sarren](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarren/pseuds/Sarren)'s beautiful [Habits and Companionship](http://archiveofourown.org/works/381524). That line is dug so deep into my post-movie Peter Guillam head canon (no matter who's asking him the question, clearly), that it keeps popping up in every damn fic about Mr. Guillam I write (or try to write). Dearest apologies, Sarren. I hope you don't mind. (If you do, please let me know!)
> 
> It would also be remiss of me not to mention [cruisedirector](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector)'s [Who Shall It Be](http://archiveofourown.org/works/444463) as inspiration; it's a lovely little fic that set this 'ship sailing for me.
> 
> Title(s) from Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters". ([Again](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1096447).)
> 
> Many thanks, as always, to #antidiogenes for all sorts and kinds of writerly support. <3


End file.
